Okay, you win, I APOLOGISE you pestiferous, pea-brained, gnat-witted, god of Excessive Precipitation.  Clearly I have upset this cloven-hoofed repository of extreme grandiosity by suggesting that the British weather really didn’t do anything terribly exciting, just got damp a lot so that we’re always obliged to carry raincoats.  By way of vengeance, he, she or it has taken it upon themselves to dump somebody else’s monsoon on us so that parts of the country got a month’s worth of rain in twenty four hours.

Now you’d think that, this being an island, the excess would just run off the edge into the sea, leaving us with some nice green fields and a bit less dust, but no; instead it heads for a High Street Near You and fills it up to the gunnels (or the Aga if you’re from the Home Counties), leaving old ladies sitting on their roofs waiting for the fire brigade to turn up in a boat. Most are seemingly taking it as it comes, or at least the ones considered fit to provide a sound bite for reporters, who are also trapped and have little else to do but gather commentary.  Naturally, we don’t hear the interviews that start So how difficult has it been sitting in your Ford Fiesta for fifteen hours with three kids under seven and your Grandad whose marbles are currently absent without official leave?  Presumably the reporter daft enough to go down that route is picking his teeth out of his shirt and consulting his PDA[1] for the whereabouts of a cosmetic surgeon.

Fortunately we’re not on flood alert here although there is a river nearby and there was an occasion when the entire community was trapped in the village by twenty yards of water that had failed to drain away from one of the two roads out of the main residential area.  The fact that many of the residents of that road had moved their cars to the other available road and blocked it seemed to escape everyone’s attention and the council got an ear-bashing for its negligence in clearing the offending drain. That’s democracy for you.

Trevor Baylis, the delightfully dotty inventor of the wind-up radio (by which I mean the radios you wind up to make work, not the ones that wind you up and stop you from working), lives on an island in the middle of the Thames where flooding is clearly a regular thing. Trevor’s got it taped though: his sockets, hand-painted dark green to match the walls but with white plugs and cables attached, are sited at waist height, and there are odd little wooden contraptions that clip across the bottom of the doors.  The piece de resistance is a raised concrete area outside the house upon which chairs and tables have been placed in the manner of a front garden.  It is painted grass green, and neatly demonstrates the distinction between capacity for invention and any sort of design sense. With any luck, Laurence Llewellyn Bowen[2] will be round sharpish to splash on some terracotta masonry paint and construct an emergency lifeboat out of MDF and some tastefully positioned appliqué motifs with a naval theme.

Meanwhile, I will knit water-wings for the cats and fit them each with a dorsal fin with a satnav in it.

[1] Personal Digital Assistant. It’s what we had before iThings.

[2] Remember the BBC’s Changing Rooms with all that flounce and MDF?

From Not Being First Fish by P Spencer-Beck.  Available from Amazon (non-illustrated edition). Second edition (illustrated) due 2018.